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gamma Soil Moisture Sensor-gSMS

Stationary Gamma-Ray Spectrometer

The Medusa gamma Soil Moisture Sensor (gSMS) is a gamma-ray spectrometer especially designed for stationary recording soil moisture content. The system is particularly designed for agricultural purposes. It is able to log the moisture content on an hourly basis and generates input for decision making on adding water to the field.

Description

The system is stand-alone and can be delivered with a solar panel to account for energy consumption. The height of the detector can be adjusted to the size of the field, however most commonly a detector height of 3 meters is used. The data recorded by the detector is automatically uploaded to a cloud service by an internal 4G connection.   

The major advantage of this sensor over standard soil moisture sensors is the large field of view. The gSMS gives and average moisture content of an entire field.

Technology

Our MS-series of Gamma-ray spectrometers are used to measure several properties of agricultural fields on a regular basis. These measurements involve mapping of soil properties on various platforms, ranging from walking surveys to quad borne surveys, drone borne surveys or airborne surveys at large altitude. In this mapping, changes in soil moisture have a very small effect on the measured results. In general, these effects are so small that they are negligible. However with a precise stationary measurement, these changes can be measured.

To detect the gamma-rays a 100ml CsI scintilation crystal installed in the detector. To lower the power use the raw data is directly send through a data connection to a cloud service. It can be on a webserver, that provides access to the multiple functions of the device, i.e.

  • Set-up of the system;
  • Status view to inspect data and functioning of the system;
  • Short and long measurement modes;
  • Download view to allow retrieval of recorded data.

This webserver can be accessed via any standard webbrowser platform.

Advantages

  • Measures average soil moisture of an area between 0.2 -1 hectare, depending on the height of installation
  • Measures average soil moisture of the top 30 cm.
  • Is independent of atmospheric conditions.
  • Measures one sample per hour.

Do you have questions about this product?

  • Questions about price, availability, and/or retailers
  • Questions about technical specifications and usage
  • Questions about suitability for your project or application

Specifications

General

Year of introduction

2020

Typical (geophysics) Application

Landborne

Embedded Processing

Gain stablilsation

Software-based (natural peaks)

Spectrum analysis

FSA

Calibration

Monte-Carlo based

Output

Digitized waveforms, 2048 channel raw spectra, 300 channel 10 keV/chan spectra, 256 chan 12 keV/chan, Activity concentrations of 40-K, 232-Th, 238-U, 137-Cs (other nuclides on request)

Inspection

Webserver based realtime visualization of MCA data

Environmental

Housing

Carbon fiber; end caps: Anodized aluminum

System weight [Kg]

1.5

IPR

IP67

Power consumption

2.5W nominally, 6W peak

Temperature Range [°C]

-20 to +50

Sensor Characteristics

Crystal Type

Csl

Volume [ml]

100

Size [inch]

2x2

Resolution

<9% at 662 keV

PMT

SiPM

Magnetically Shielded

Y

Electronics

ADC

14 bit, 250Mhz

Energy response [keV]

30 to 3000

Excess energies

Summed in last channel

Channels [raw]

2048

Pulse shaping

Digital

Deadtime

zero

Baseline restoration

Digital

Pile-up rejection

Present

Sample rate [Hz]

0-10

I/O

Ethernet, RS232

Internal storage [GB]

32

Timestamp

GPS-based, world time

Other specifications

Calibration

Calibrated using Monte Carlo simulated response curves (MCNP). Absolute calibration against any geometry.

Post-processing

Comes with full-spectrum analysis software. Airborne correction suite: Elevation correction, Cosmic correction and Radon correction.

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